Newman took up the term "post-anarchism" as a general term for political philosophies filtering 19th century anarchism through a post-structuralist lens, and later popularized it through his 2001 book From Bakunin to Lacan. Thus he rejects a number of concepts traditionally associated with anarchism, including essentialism, a "positive" human nature, and the concept of revolution. The links between poststructuralism and anarchism have also been developed by thinkers like Todd May and Lewis Call.

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Some of Newman's publications in recent times deal with Max Stirner, a German philosopher of the mid-19th century, author of the famous book Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (1845) (Engl. trans. The Ego and Its Own, 1907). Newman regards Stirner as a key figure in developing a new radical critique of Western society. He calls Stirner a proto-poststructuralist who on the one hand basically anticipated modern poststructuralists such as Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze, and Derrida, but on the other had already transcended them, thus providing what they were unable to: paving the ground for a "non-essentialist" critique of present liberalcapitalist society. Newman's interpretation of Stirner has received some degree of attention, including an endorsement by Ernesto Laclau, who provided a foreword to From Bakunin to Lacan.